Rewind: 6 Points Per Touchdown Pass Leagues

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Speaker 1: What's happened in everyone? It's JJ here with another Late Round podcast rewind, and actually this is the last one that I'll be bringing back until next offseason. I've been talking about the quarterback position a lot of late on the show. I had the streaming episode that was a rewind, and just on Monday, I dropped an episode on how the late round quarterback strategy is slightly changing. I'm gonna continue that trend and play a show today on leagues with six points per touchdown pass and how you should adjust your draft strategy in those leagues. Now, at the end of the episode, you're gonna hear something pretty funny humble brag here. But you guys know that I touted Lamar Jackson pretty heavily last season. He was my late round quarterback target. But I and anyone else who touted Jackson, I didn't see the passing season that he had coming. And I actually think that at the end of today's episode, it's a good learning for everyone. Myself included that even though we may think that we understand upside, we don't always understand true upside. We can't always comprehend outliers, and upside in general is typically not strongly defined. We loosely throw the term around. Again. I'm saying all this because of what you'll hear at the end of this episode. It's a really quick reference without much analysis on my end, but hopefully you'll catch it and you'll understand what I'm saying here. But as always, thanks for listening, and I hope the episode helps you in any six point per touchdown pass leagues that you might be in. But my league is different, they'll tell me. In my league, quarterbacks get six points per touchdown pass, so they're a lot more valuable than the typical fantasy football league. This is one of the most common things that I hear around the late round quarterback strategy. Instead of four points per touchdown pass, some leagues give quarterbacks six points, and as a result, fantasy managers seem to think that this should alter their draft strategy. Does it make quarterbacks a little bit more important to a degree? Yes? Should it change the way you approach the position in your draft? Absolutely not. If you didn't listen to last week's show on quarterback streaming, the concepts that I talked about in that episode are going to be very relevant today. So hit pause, go back into the podcast feed and listen to that episode if you haven't already. But today I'm going to talk about leagues that give you six points per touchdown pass. Maybe you don't play in a league that rewards quarterbacks that many points for each touchdown throw, but you should still get something out of today's episode regardless. But before getting into things with the US Open teeing off on Thursday, Fandel is letting you benefit from Brooks Kepka's dominance. Enter the five hundred thousand dollars PGA Eagle and you'll get a free entry into the Birdie Bonus free play the following week. The size of that free play depends on how well Brooks does for every birdy he makes. Fandel is adding two thousand dollars to the pool, and it's four thousand dollars for every Eagle, And all you have to do to get a shot at that free cash is to play in the Eagle contest for the US Open. For more information and to get yourself entered, just go to fandle and check out the PGA Lobby. Eligibility restrictions apply. So why is it that people start to think that you need quarterbacks more in leagues where they're rewarded six points per touchdown pass. Well, I think the answer is pretty obvious. When quarterbacks are getting an additional two points per touchdown pass, players who separate themselves in that category are then gaining a more significant edge over the rest of the position. Take Patrick Mahomes twenty eighteen as an example. He had fifty passing touchdowns last year. In standard scoring leagues. He scored four hundred and seventeen Fantasy points. Those fifty passing touchdowns were eleven more than the player with the second most touchdowns, which is Andrew Luck. Andrew Luck scored about three hundred and twenty seven standard Fantasy points, So the difference between Mahomes and Luck was ninety points in a standard four points per touchdown pass league last year. But because Mahomes had eleven more touchdown passes, that difference of ninety becomes ninety plus eleven times two, or one hundred and twelve because the eleven touchdown pass difference is gaining an extra two points per touchdown pass. And the same idea works for projections too. Let's say you have Patrick Mahomes projected for forty touchdown passes this season and that's fifteen more than a replacement level quarterback in fantasy football. Mahomes is then gaining an additional thirty point edge over that replacement level player in a six point per touchdown pass league. So naturally, the idea is that since there's a larger edge being gained, you should then value that player more on a season long level. If you look at projections or results, the very good quarterbacks are absolutely separating themselves more than they otherwise would. This is where the argument for an earlier quarterback pick in this type of league format starts and ends, though, and it relates back to the ideas that I talked about on last week's episode on quarterback streaming. Those ideas are predictability and replaceability with predictability. Just to reiterate what I talked about last week, we're looking at how predictable a performance was on a weekly or season long level. As I said in that episode, quarterbacks give you the most predictable output on a week to week basis. All the math behind this claim is in that show. So we know quarterbacks give you predictable output at least compared to other positions in fantasy football, So you should be using that to your advantage. Since things are more predictable, it's an easy to find games where those quarterbacks are at least going to give you some sort of good Florida ceiling combo. And you do that through analyzing matchups and sportsbook numbers and all the things that we look at week to week when evaluating if you should start or sit someone. That alone makes the top the position less value no matter the format. One of the reasons elite tight ends make more sense than elite quarterbacks in fantasy football, despite the fact that you're starting the same number at the position in your lineup, is because elite tight ends are giving you an edge in predictable output. Not just output, but predictable output. To think of this another way, when you go from Travis Kelsey to Zachertz to George Kittle all the way to say a lower tight end one like David and Joku, you're not just losing an edge in the points scored column. You're losing an edge in the predictable points scored column. You at least know that Travis Kelsey is going to be peppered with targets, and then he's going to give you a pretty nice floor each week. You don't know that at all with David and Joku, but at quarterback that's completely different. You know that the majority of passers are going to provide some sort of scoring because they're throwing the ball thirty plus times per game. So even Andy Dalton going into a given week has somewhat predictable production. And Andy Dalton is a complete afterthought in single quarterback leagues. This is one of the many reasons elite quarterbacks should be inherently devalued going into a draft, and that goes for elite quarterbacks in any type of scoring format where you're still starting just one quarterback in your lineup, or I should say, any reasonable scoring format. Basically, it's not like this weekly predictability aspect just gets thrown out the window because quarterbacks are all of a sudden getting two more points per touchdown pass, So that's weekly predictability. There's also the idea of season long predictability, which is arguably the more important topic for this particular conversation. Season long predictability looks at how a player was ranked pre draft versus how he finishes the season, and for some reason, people really seem to think that early round quarterbacks just never bust that they're safe options, but they're not. I talked through this on the Streaming Quarterback episode, but they have no better predictability than early round running backs and wide receivers from a season long perspective. In fact, it's been worse in recent years. Again, I'm not going to get into the math behind this because I talked about it seven days ago, but the math is in the podcast episode from seven days ago. What this means is that the quarterbacks that you're drafting even earlier in these six points per touchdown pass formats aren't even los to be the quarterbacks who were giving you an edge over your competition. I mean, even last season we had nine players throw thirty or more touchdown passes. Only one of those players, Russell Wilson, was drafted as a top five quarterback. Only four of the nine were drafted in the top ten, So over half of the thirty plus touchdown quarterbacks were basically drafted as QB twos are worse or at least low end QB ones. Those for the record were Ben Roethlisberg or Philip Rivers, Matt Ryan, Jared Goff, and the fifty touchdown passer himself, Patrick Mahomes now. To be completely honest, I don't have average draft position data on leagues where you're getting six points per touchdown pass. So maybe there'd be some differentiation there, maybe some of the players would have been ranked higher in six point per touchdown pass leagues. But it's not like we as fantasy managers have been perfect at predicting which quarterbacks are going to be really good in fantasy football each year. We're not that good at it. So when you reach or take a quarterback earlier than normal in this type of format, you're not necessarily getting a quarterback who's actually giving you any sort of edge. And while you can make the argument that any running back or receiver that you'd be getting instead has the exact same problem, the difference is that those positions are still higher in demand than quarterbacks are. You need more running backs and wide receivers, they matter more. And that brings me to the idea of replaceability. I already alluded to the supply and demand aspect of fantasy football on how it plays a role, but with a six point per touchdown pass league, you're not changing the supply and demand formula. You still only need one quarterback and there are still a ton of usable quarterbacks out there, and that makes the position still very replaceable in a six point per touchdown pass format. It's not like you have fewer quarterbacks to choose from. It's not like you can't utilize predictability and play these guys by matchups. And it's not like lower tiered quarterbacks or even waiver wier quarterbacks are incapable of having a multi touchdown game. People tend to simply overstate this scoring impact. In general. We see what it could do on a season long level, but not the weekly level. And the weekly level is really where this replaceability concept comes into play. To help playing this, I went back and I looked at every single quarterback performance since twenty eleven, from weeks one through sixteen. I just removed the Fantasy Football worthless week seventeen because it can bring some really funky scoring. What I wanted to do is look at the weekly ranking between a player before and after the six point per touchdown pass scoring change. So if a player ranked six with four point per touchdown pass scoring, where would he have ranked had he been getting an additional two points per touchdown pass? And this is all within the context of quarterback rankings or quarterback finishes when looking at top twenty quarterbacks, and the reason I'm just looking at top twenty ones here is because someone who ranked like fiftieth, they'll clearly see more variance in an exercise like this. But when looking at all the top twenty performances since twenty eleven, when excluding week seventeen, you get two five hundred and sixty individual performances. Among those twenty five hundred and sixty, over seventy one percent of the performance ranks either shifted by one, negative one, or zero. So essentially, over seventy percent of the time where a player ranked in a four points per touchdown pass league is where he ranked in a six points per touchdown pass league, and just seven of the twenty five hundred and sixty instances saw a player shift his rank by more than six. Now, a couple of things about this. A small part of the reason there's not a lot of change is because players who are benefiting most from the two additional points per touchdown already ranked first or second and weekly scoring they were already good, so they can't really move up any higher than they already are. But even if you look at the number of top six, top twelve, and top eighteen performances that these players are putting together under this new scoring across the entire season, It's really hard to find any real significant change. Here's the crazy thing too. Over this time, we had forty four performances where a quarterback had five or more touchdown passes. Now this is arbitrary, but for purposes of putting something together that's digestible, I had to put a cutoff somewhere, and I put that cutoff at five touchdowns. So those forty four performers, you would say, were the ones who were benefiting most from this scoring change. They threw a lot of touchdown passes, so naturally they were getting a larger edge in that given week versus the rest of their competition. Well more than half of those quarterbacks with five plus touchdown games over the last eight years were drafted outside the top ten of fantasy drafts. So the players who are putting up these big performances, the ones who should be benefiting from this type of scoring most aren't even the ones who are necessarily being drafted early. That's the definition of replaceability. Now, I don't want anyone to walk away from this episode, thinking that there's absolutely no change that occurs when we alter the scoring for quarterback touchdowns. There is high end performances look better. Some quarterbacks do gain more of an edge, but at what cost? We know the position is predictable week to week, but then we also know that we're actually not very good at predicting which quarterbacks will be the ones giving us a significant edge throughout the entire season, and they're replaceable. This isn't a superflex format. You're still starting just one quarterback, so the eason obtaining a quarterback still isn't a challenge. You can get someone off the waiver wire who's going to start if need be. You can also wait and wait and wait to get one during your draft. And that's the key here. When I say at what cost, I'm literally asking you when would you be drafting your quarterback in this format? Because if average draft positions rise even by a round or two, all of a sudden, the people getting Patrick Mahomes in the second or third round are seeing a higher opportunity cost when they select him. The players they're skipping over when they get Patrick Mahomes are far better than what they would be skipping over in the fourth round. And not only that, if someone gets Mahomes in the second round and then someone else waits to get their quarterback in the thirteenth or the fourteenth round, then the team who got Mahomes will get less value out of that pick. It'd be one thing that they got Patrick Mahomes in the second round and then every other team picked a quarterback in the second round as well, But that's not what's likely to happen. The point edge that Mahomes is giving you, or is projected to give you, is being spread across more rounds than it typically is. So not only are these quarterbacks not as predictable as you think year over year, and not only are they replaceable, but when you drive up their ADP, you're arguably devaluing that pick even more than you typically would with an early round quarterback selection. Now, there is one takeaway here. If you're in one of these leagues, it seems pretty intuitive, and it is, but the data backs it up as well. If you're drafting a quarterback in this format, don't fall into the trap of drafting a rushing quarterback. If you look at the performances that drop the most in weekly quarterback rankings from four point per touchdown pass leagues to six point ones. It really had to do with rushing. Among the forty instances where a player's weekly ranked drop by five or more, the average rushing touchdowns scored per game by those players was point seven to eight. Twenty eight of the forty players rush for a touchdown. This mathematically and logically makes sense. When a player rushes for a touchdown, it's weighed more heavily in standard leagues than when he passes for one. When passing touchdowns count the same, then players who were benefiting from rushing touchdowns aren't benefiting as much. So that's where my strategy would change. Instead of aiming for rushing upside with someone like Lamar Jackson, maybe look at someone like Jamis Winston instead. Go for someone who has a legitimate chance at thirty five to forty passing touchdowns, not the player who's giving you the rush wishing advantage. But whatever you do, don't start reaching for a quarterback. It's just not worth it. That's gonna do it for today's show, Thanks to everyone for listening. If you've got subscribed to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it. On iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, tune in, Stitcher, and Spotify, and feel free to follow me on Twitter at late round QB. Thanks everyone, talk to you later in the week.